Ideas and Resources for Teaching Spanish and MFL from a Spanish Teacher using Mary Glasgow Magazines in her Classroom.

Avoiding Common Errors in Spanish: Subjunctive mood with activities III

By Maje

Welcome back to the subjunctive mood. 😉

Today we are dealing with another common error in Spanish: subjunctive mood with adjectival clauses, the ones we use to modify a noun in the main clause. For example: “I work for a company which publishes books and magazines.”

Now see the sentences below:

Trabajo en una compañía que publica libros y revistas.

Quiero trabajar en una compañía que publique libros y revistas.

Same thing? Not really. Ask your students to circle all verbs and tell you the tenses I have used. As we advised you last week, now tell them to take some time and explain you the meaning of both sentences in their own words.

As they will realise, we use the indicative when the antecedent (the noun to which the clause refers) is an existing one and a definite. On the other hand, we use the subjunctive mood when the antecedent is non-existent, unknown or negated.

Answers: conozco, tenga, guste, está, esté, explique, hable, sabe.

You can also use this interesting article on jobs to come to create an extension task. Ideally, you would give some cards with information to your students and then tell them to work in groups and describe a candidate for a current job and a candidate for a job to come.

For instance, a teacher and biohacker.

Un profesor es una persona que trabaja con estudiantes.

Un biohacker será una persona que trabaje con plantas.

How do you work with adjectival clauses which requires subjunctive? Any lesson plan you would like to share with us? How do you ensure your students overcome common errors in Spanish? Looking forward to your comments.